Social Matter

The simple answer to this is that progressives took over the universities, and gradually made it so that those universities were the only institutions legally empowered to test on merit. This has made it so that parents eager to improve the standing of their children (and by extension, themselves and their families) will send their children to the most prestigious leftist seminary that they can afford.

In this way, progressives stack the decks of management at larger corporations and the government, both of which tend to prize credentials far more. It’s hard to be fired for hiring the Harvard MBA, but you can be easily blamed for taking a chance on someone who doesn’t have such a credential.

Conservatives and other independent thinkers will find that they’re barred from advancement in the most established and capital-intensive industries. They will often be socially awkward, as progressives, particularly bourgeois ones, have different moral standards, expectations, gender norms, religious beliefs, rituals, aesthetics, and ways of thinking.

This is all rather a normal state of affairs when you consider the broader historical perspective. A dominant faction which controls a territory makes life hard for its political opponents: news at 11. What’s odd about it is that people on the right tend to prefer to delude themselves that they’re not in the weak political position, that they’re not an unrepresented mass with poor influence over the elite which actually runs the country and owns most of the capital.

Part of this illusion has been the idea of bipartisanship — that the real sensible, practical way to handle things is to cede power to smooth-talking people who can see all sides of the issue and broker compromise. This is really more of an illusion than a reality, though, as those compromises always tend to favor the bureaucratic left in the long run.

Progressives, by controlling all the organs of influence in the country, can shift the moral climate this way and that way as the fancy takes them. What was the normal, majority, moderate-left opinion in 2008 is now considered the bigoted opinion. Our grandparents’ generation tends to be spoken in the same tones of moral condemnation as the victorious allies heaped upon the defeated axis, and thanks to short democratic memories, few tend to remark that this is odd.

By denying the right access to capital by purging corporate institutions of political nonconformists, the dominant faction grows in power, while the weaker faction loses power. The response of this weaker faction has usually been to whine and cry about it a lot, because of the cruelty of it all.

The better way to address this comes in a few parts:

• Recognize that your faction is weak and fragmented, while the opposition is strong and unified
• Do what you can to strengthen and unify your faction, while weakening and dividing the opposition
• Break the opposition

Again, all easy to say, but hard to do. What’s important for the right is to recognize itself as such, and to also see that its interests are harmed rather than served by compromise and cooperation with the progressives who have every intention of destroying their opponents, physically or otherwise, as soon as they have the will and means to do so.

The biggest idiot-distraction is the ballot box, because the actual conflict is between people and institutions. The focus ought to be on the direct conflict, there, rather than the circuitous Rube Goldberg strategy of hoping that some gel-haired guy that you insert into Washington with the help of a high-paid speechwriter and a direct mail wizard will somehow have some minute influence on a some institution or another that he has no direct power over.

Moderates rightists, here and there, are coming to this conclusion themselves, semi-independently. They ought to be prodded along.